news

As the nation marks Equal Pay Day, Congressman Paul Tonko (D-NY) said today that more needs to be done to close the wage gap that still exists between women and men – including passage of the critical Paycheck Fairness Act (H.R. 1619).  Equal Pay Day symbolizes when, more than three months into the year, women’s wages finally catch up to what men were paid in the previous year.

“In the State of New York, women still make 14% less than a man does for every dollar earned in the workplace,” said Tonko. “Nationwide, that figure gets worse as the average American woman only makes 78 cents on the dollar to their male counterparts. If we really want to get serious about economic growth and boosting middle-class families, we have to stop stifling half of our workforce and pass the Paycheck Fairness Act.”

The Paycheck Fairness Act is a central pillar of the House Democrats’ When Women Succeed, America Succeeds: An Economic Agenda for Women and Families.  It strengthens and closes loopholes in the Equal Pay Act of 1963.

Among its many provisions, the Paycheck Fairness Act requires employers to show that pay disparity is truly related to job performance, not gender; strengthens remedies for women experiencing pay discrimination; prohibits employer retaliation for sharing salary information with coworkers; and empowers women in the workplace through a grant program to strengthen salary negotiation and other workplace skills.

President John F. Kennedy signed into law the Equal Pay Act in 1963 when the gender pay gap was even wider and women earned only 59 cents for every dollar a man earned. Almost 52 years later, the law has never been updated or strengthened, creating the need for the Paycheck Fairness Act.

When it comes to a woman’s changing role in our economy, America’s workplaces have simply not kept up. A new study from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research finds that women won’t see pay equity with men until 2058 based on the rate that the pay gap has been closing since 1960.

“Equal pay is not simply a woman’s issue – it a family issue,” Tonko added.  “Families increasingly rely on women’s wages to make ends meet.  When women bring home less money each day, it means they have less for the everyday needs of their families – groceries, housing, car payments, student loans, child care and medical visits. ”

###